Amara Moira is a post-doc trans whore who wants you to hear this

“My name is Amara Moira, I’m 30 years old, I’m a doctoral candidate at Unicamp. I prostitute myself in Jardim Itatinga. And I recently started a blog.”

Amara spoke at the Observatory of Prostitution’s extension course, A Particular Revolution: The Brazilian Prostitutes Movment, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro on November 24, 2015.

(Quem fala portugues pode escutar o audio aqui.)

 

Being part of the Brazilian movement of prostitutes has a special significance for me, because I brought this up to the LGBT and trans movement in São Paulo, that we need to stop pretending that prostitution isn’t part of our reality too. The movement loves to talk about how 90% of travestis are prostitutes, but refuses to consider regulating the sex industry. There’s been no progress on this debate. They refuse to address the issue.

[Applause]

When I brought this issue up at the start of 2015, what happened is that I was summarily kicked out of the trans movement in São Paulo. And when I refused to be excluded, the leadership in São Paulo hit my head against a wall, and I decided that it was no longer the place for me to be speaking out.

One of the most impressive things is that I feel much more embraced here in Rio, I can say things without this hygienization, “Let’s only talk about clean things”.

No. Let’s talk about reality in all its forms and perspectives. Let’s fight against violence and discrimination. Let’s say the dirty words that nobody wants to hear.

So to be here today signifies a lot of things for me.

One of the things I was thinking about after [veteran trans activist] Indianara spoke was this thing about violence against the married woman:

“People say prostitution is violent, but in 2014, about 5,000 Brazilian women were killed by their husbands, partners, ex’s, or someone else they trusted. I can say that today in Brazil it’s safer to be a prostitute than a wife.”

I started thinking about when a woman’s husband or companion or ex is violent towards her. I wonder, who is it easier to ask to use a condom? Your husband, or your client?

And when we ask this question, which is pretty arbitrary, we can also notice the extent to which the issue of HIV is becoming a problem for married women in heterosexual, monogamous relationships.

There are specific kinds of violence a woman can experience within a monogamous relationship, and other types of violence that sex workers experience. We need to know how to identify these violences and what to call them if we are going to fight against them.

So I wonder, Amara, there you are at Unicamp…. Wait a minute, I haven’t even introduced myself.

I’m Amara Moira, I’m 30 years old, I’m a doctoral candidate at Unicamp (State University of Campinas). I prostitute myself in Jardim Itatinga with Betânia [a sex worker activist also in attendance at the event]. And I recently started a blog.

The blog is what brought me here today: E se eu fosse puta [“What if I were a whore?”].

I’ve had it for a year or so. It’s where I give accounts of interactions I have with clients, and not just any kind of accounts. Not like a “marketing” account, where the client comes with me and then goes and sees what I’m going to write about him to feel all good about himself.

I’d rather my clients don’t know about my blog, because if they knew, they might become a little irritated. Because the perspective I adopt is feminist and literary. It’s a perspective that is trying to make visible some of the micro-aggressions that are at work, for example, during the price negotiation.

Or during the negotiation about what we’re going to do in bed.

How the sex is going to end.

The difficulties getting your client to pay you.

Maybe he tries to negotiate the price after you’ve already had sex, or he doesn’t want to pay in advance.

Or when it comes time to sex, because of the vulnerability of being a prostitute in Brazil — because if all of us could be luxury prostitutes, if that could be the reality for all of us, then when a client comes up to you and says, “I’ll give you 50 reais [$12] more to have sex without a condom” — we’d laugh in his face. We’d spit in his face and make him stick his money up his ass.

But that’s not the reality we’re living. We live in a reality where often, prostitution is conducted in precarious conditions, in a difficult way. There are times you feel destitute, when it’s night and it’s raining and cold, or when you’re working during the day and the sun is beating down on you, and you have to work, but you don’t see a single client, just long lines of cars passing you and ignoring your face, people who don’t want to know anything about you. And then maybe one shows up who offers you 50 reais more to do it without a condom.

And a lot of times, you end up accepting it. Without criticisms, without a value judgement, you accept it.

We need to understand the situation [we’re living in], and fight against the social vulnerability that drives many of us to engage in sex work in a precarious way. We have to fight against precariousness, not prostitution.

One of the things I’m going to talk about — I hope I don’t sound like I’m playing the victim, but if I sound that way, come at me and make me re-think my terms — because I want to identify these violences so we know what we’re fighting against.

Indianara pointed this out well when she said that violence against prostitutes is about male domination. So we have to fight against machismo. It’s not just about fighting for regulating sex work. We also need to fight against machismo.

It’s many fights, but it’s all the same fight. A fight against machismo. A fight against racism. A fight against transphobia. A fight for us to be able to do our work in a way that is not precarious. For us to be able to do our work in a way that is more supported.

For someone who’s in a vulnerable situation, when an aggressive client shows up, it’s hard. You have to be an empowered puta [whore] to be able to deal with certain kinds of situations.

So we have to fight for this empowerment, for sex professionals to have pride in what they do, for them to have full consciousness of their rights. I think this needs to be a priority.

We need to be able to reach people [in precarious situations] and bring them into the realm of militância [militancy, or activism].  Because militância is an empowering space. For you to realize you’re not alone. It’s important to not be alone.

So first I wanted to talk about prostitution specifically from the lens of travestis and transsexuals.

I’m 30 years old, and it’s only been a year and a half since I started my transition and asked the first person to call me “Amara”. And when people ask me what took so long, something that comes into my head is the fact that all the people I’ve met since I was like 15, when I saw a travesti for the first time — every single one of these people was a prostitute, and was living in a precarious way.

And I thought, “If I found myself in this situation one day, I don’t think I could handle it.” So I blocked this thing inside of me and said, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

Because prostitution is only the tip of the iceberg of what these people that I met along the way had lived through. In most of the cases I can remember, there was an issue of family violence, of the person being kicked out of the house. Just because of the fact that you’re a transsexual, you lose your family, you lose the right to continue your education. And without an education, you aren’t going to have the doors of formal employment open to you.

But even with an education, you won’t.

A lot of times people ask me, “You’re going to have your doctorate, are you going to continue prostituting yourself?”

I’m afraid. I don’t know for sure, when I get my doctorate, if there will be an institution that wants to hire me. I even have the sensation, that after getting my doctorate, the only place for me to work is going to be telemarketing. And if that’s the case, I’d rather be a whore.

[Applause]

I have no problem having sex with strangers, for example. That is not a problem for me.

[Applause]

Let me be very clear. Having sex with strangers was always really easy for me. I recently moved and found my diaries from when I was 18. I wrote down the number of times I’d done banheirão. I don’t know if you know what that is, maybe it’s better not to know.

[Banheirão, literally “big bathroom”, means having sex in a public restroom.]

But I remember at one point I wrote, “Men, for me… I can only bring myself to have sex with strangers. I can’t have sex with my friends.” For me, it’s always been a strictly sexual issue, and as such, it was better, even, that I didn’t know who they were or have to see them the next day, or have to live with them day to day.

The best sex I had was always with these types. It excited me more. It was always very pleasurable with me to have sex with anonymous types. So then I wrote, “My God, I’d be a good prostitute.”  [Laughs]

But at the same time, being a prostitute was not the problem for me. The problem was the social exclusion that being a prostitute represented. And at that moment I wasn’t prepared to deal with that.

From the moment I became part of the movement — before I joined the trans movement, I was part of the LGBT movement as a bi-sexual, which I’ve always been. And within the LGBT movement, I felt empowered by this spirit of fighting to transform the world so that I can fit into it too, so that the world knows to respect me and anyone like me.

It was this moment of empowerment I felt in the LGBT movement that I felt the right to transition. To claim my right to be called by a different name. For people to learn, “OK, you have this right to claim another name and gender.”

It’s funny, because I started to think, “I’m inside this movement that preaches the end of discrimination against prostitutes,” but I could perceive that I was still afraid inside. And all of a sudden I recognized that I was tremendously desperate. Because when you begin your transition, your body is neither here nor there. It’s a little masculine, a little feminine. The horrific fear of wondering, if I take off my clothes, will this guy or this girl turn around and say I’m a man?

I remember when I went to visit my travesti friends working the street, guys looked at me and asked, “How much?”, and wanted to have sex with me and have access to my body. That’s where I started to calm down and say, “This could be interesting.”

But you know what? I knew this wasn’t going to just be “interesting.” I was going to want to talk about it publicly. Because this fear that kept me from transitioning earlier could be keeping others from doing it too.

And at the same time, this fear is affecting the lives of all of my friends who are prostituting themselves, often in precarious conditions. I’d like for them to have a voice, to be able to speak up about their reality, and to be able to demand better working conditions for themselves.

So I started my blog, and my first experience [with a client] was hard, because I hadn’t had sex in a year. A client showed up, with his nose bleeding from all the coke he’d snorted, all crazy and high, and he wanted 20 reais [$5] for the “works” in his car.

I hadn’t had sex in a year, and I’m going to charge 20 reais? [Laughs]. Am I going to lose my virginity for 20 reais?

I said, “It has to be at least 30 reais [two more dollars],” as if that makes a difference.

[Laughter]

He said, “I won’t pay 30,” and so I went home empty-handed. It took me a month to come back. And from there on out it was much smoother. It was one client after the other. One offered 50 reais and I didn’t even ask for it. Another was 30, then another was 30, and I was like, “I’m going to get rich here!”

[Laughter]

I started to talk about this on my blog very euphorically. At the beginning, I was like, “People, this is good, this is pleasurable, I am doing this and feeling pleasure inside.”

But I also had this question of feminism with me all along. The feminist battle. And little by little, an experience that was pleasurable at the time — I’d walk away saying, “My God, this is going to be such an interesting story for the blog” — and when I started to write I started to remember what happened, and started noticing, “Wait a minute. Some weird things just happened.” But I only started realizing it through the process of writing down what had happened and rationalizing my experience.

There was an abrupt transition on my blog from euphoria to what my friends called, “Depressive Amara.”

[Laughter]

Because I started to point out everything that seemed violent, because I felt violated. I needed to go through this phase of feeling violated, so that today I can look at the situation more calmly.

It’s funny, for example, the question of being assaulted. It’s an issue that is going to cross paths with every travesti alive. Everywhere you go, someone is going to ask you “how much” and try to put their hands on you and treat you like a piece of meat. And you’re going to have to be very strong to deal with that. Whether you’re a prostitute or not, you’re going to be treated like a prostitute.

It is going to cost the trans movement if they continue to refuse to deal with this issue.

Today, I was on the bus from São Paulo to Campinas — I live in Campinas — and this guy sat down next to me. And when he saw I was a travesti, he simply took his dick out.

Maybe another time I would have cried. At this moment, I asked him how much I was going to make, and walked out of there with 30 reais for a blowjob.

[Laughter]

That’s what it’s about. You have to learn to be strong. I think one of the things I’ve been learning a lot from the other women at this extension course, and with the prostitute’s movement, is how to be strong. Let’s fight strong. You have to be strong to deal with this. Empowerment is essential.

So the blog became a place where I am committed to describing violences I experience, but to also point out exits, ways we can deal with the aggressions we live with, with the delights we encounter along the way as well. I can also say that I feel pleasure, that I climax.

It’s hard to say, right? Because at the same time prostitution seems like the only road for us, we also have to feel ashamed for doing it.

I brought my travesti friends to Unicamp for a panel, and we stopped at the cafe and I started talking about my most recent clients. And they turned to me and said, “Don’t talk so loud. You’re at your university!”

[Laughter]

They’ve read all the crazy stuff on my blog, but they’re ashamed I’m talking about it at my school? In other words, for these women who live this reality with me day to day, there’s a certain shame to be in a place like that.

It’s important for us to fight against this stigma. So that people stop feeling ashamed for taking the road they discovered.

Something that gives me pause is the following: Prostitution is such a central part of being a travesti, that when someone comes to us and says they want to abolish prostitution, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re talking about wanting to abolish the only space that we have found for ourselves to exist.

When we get kicked out of our houses and have nowhere else to go, we turn to prostitution. And that’s where we can find our freedom.

[Applause]

It can be a violent space. It can be a hard place. But we have to learn to deal with this place. We have to create a more supportive and respectful place for ourselves in society.

One final point on my blog. Questions are starting to emerge. At some point someone called my writing “fat-phobic.”

A client would show up and treat me poorly, and I would end up discounting him, even unconsciously. Maybe I’d say he was fat, or use some silly name to refer to his body — a body that had given me pleasure, to be honest, but because he treated me poorly, when it came time to write down who he was, it would end up slipping into the writing.

That’s when I realized that it’s important for my writing to be activist and militant, but I need to be committed to the invention of a way of writing that does not reproduce oppression. A way of writing that encourages freedom, and does not reproduce discrimination against people with disabilities, racism, fat-phobism, machismo, transphobia…. a way of writing that empowers our bodies, our existences, the spaces we occupy, that at the same time identifies and gives name to the violences that make us vulnerable.

This has become one of the mottos of my blog. To try to develop a way of writing that describes violence, but also offers possibilities for the future, possibilities for us to think in our own terms about our work and activities.

It’s important that we’re here today, thinking about this inside the university. It is important for us to reclaim our right to think and talk about our situation, and not just leave it to academics to say who we are and what we do. We, the prostitutes, are going to start writing our own stories.

Thank you.

 

 

Read on:

Amara’s blog, E se eu fosse puta, or follow Amara on Facebook (both in Portuguese)

Prepara NEM, an organization preparing travestis, trans and others in vulnerable social situations or suffering gender discirmination for the ENEM, the Brazilian college entrance exam (in Portuguese)

Rio SlutWalk: Photos from the 2015 Rio de Janeiro SlutWalk (via Riochromatic)